Think of the irony. We've been getting
calls, emails, inquiries from Israel. They want to know... if we're
OK.

Are we OK? I am not sure. On this
morning of Rosh Hashanah, we remain in the midst of shock and sadness,
of terror and tragedy. But in one small, sardonic way, in trying
to find the right words to respond to the world around us, I am
grateful. I want to express my appreciation, my thanks, my gratitude
to Jerry Falwell. And
Pat Robertson. For opening their mouths. And saving my sermon.

You know, I had written this... theological
reflection about the way the universe works. In it I tried I
will try to share with you that I don't think things happen
for a reason. It's a common claim, you've heard itmaybe you've
even used it. "Oh, everything happens for a reason." But I don't
believe it. And I wanted to tell you why.

But after last
Tuesday... I don't know. For a moment the words sounded hollow.
Because Tuesday... it's not like it was some earthquake or something.
It wasn't a natural occurrence. It did happen for a reason. And
the reason was evil.

So into the recycle bin went the
sermon. But onto the talk shows went Falwell. And here it is, back
from the abyss, a message I believe is actually important. An opportunity
to disagree with every breath in my body... with the Reverends
Falwell and Robertson.

Did you hear what they said? It was...
horrendous. Some of you told me about it. It was so bad that I
have to confess I just didn't believe you, until I saw the words
themselves.

Listen to this... this theological
chutzpah!

The ACLU's got to take a lot
of blame for this," Falwell said. He continued: "Throwing God
out...of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists
have got to bear some burden for this, because God will not
be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies,
we make God mad.

[I Interrupt the Falwell quote with note
on the Slepian family.
Dr. Barnett Slepian a fertility specialist... often discouraged
abortions. Comment from his funeral: he helped women, and he
saved women's lives. I don't think that he did anything to make
God mad.]

I really believe
that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and
the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that
an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American
Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize AmericaI point
the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

Isn't it nice, to be so sure of yourself?
I mean, here's a man who knows what God wants. He's certain. I
like people who are absolutely certain they have a direct line
to God. They're the healthiest people around, aren't they? I mean,
they're sure of themselves, they know they're right, they don't
have to waste money in therapy. They don't have any room for doubt,
when they blow up buildings and topple towers and slaughter innocent
civilians in the name of their certitude.

Sometimes I think that this is the
reason we read the Akedah (the story of Abraham thinking
he is called upon to sacrifice his son) on Rosh Hashanah morning.
It is a warning against certainty, against acting on what you
think you are so sure God wants you to do. I believe that God
spoke only once in that story -- the "second" time... in order
to prevent Abraham
from doing with Isaac what Abraham thought God wanted him
to do.

Maybe the worst thing about what
Falwell saidand Robertson agreed withwas its terrible
timing. At a time of national unity, what has he done, but tear
us apart? We face a cunning and deadly enemy abroad; now we know
we have an enemy within as well.

But the biggest problem I have
with Falwell's remarks are the assumptions he makes about God.
The very biggest problem I have... is that I just don't agree that
God micro-manages the universe.

The Reverends wants to talk about
babies? Fine. So let's start there.

In the middle of [my wife] Julie's
pregnancy with our oldest child, Benjamin, someone did something
so kind for us that I will never forget it. Some of you may see
our three young children and never know, or never guess, but it
was a long and difficult road to get there. It took us over five
years to have Benjamin. We are very, very lucky. Learning of our
impending arrival, a colleague wrote that she was about to go on
a trip to Israel, and that she would write a petek at the Kotel,
a petitionary note placed in the crevices of the Wailing Wall,
wishing for us a safe birth and a healthy child.

You know, I had been having a hectic
day. My mind was far away. But as I read those words wishing us
well, this gesture from halfway across the world, as I read those
words my world stood still. And I cried. I wept. What a wonderful
thing, this unexpected gesture of love and support. It was so touching.
But I remember wondering: what are those words on a scrap of paper
going to do for us? What will they actually accomplish? What good
could it do? I cried at the kindness and love. But I also wondered
why I was crying.

Cosmic questions, the kind we ask
about the big things, the meaning of life, the reality of love,
the reason for evil, the reach of God... these kinds of questions
can flame up from any spark, arise at the most unexpected moments.
Tuesday dawned an ordinary day, a week ago. Who knew the crying
we would do, and the questions we would have, just hours later?

This morning I would like to begin
to approach a difficult question about why things happen, in the
wake of a very real tragedy, with an insight I had in the middle
of a pretty bad movie, about a fictional tragedy.

I remember actually enjoying the
filmIndependence
Day. Our people are in panic, our arsenals are impotent,
our world is about to be blown to bits. But, you know that raises
some really interesting questions.

I am thinking, for the moment, of
the character played by the ever-lovable Judd
Hirsch. Judd Hirsch's wife had died twenty years before
the action began. And he was angry, angry with himself, angry with
the world, angry with God. A once religious man, he had not set
foot in a synagogue in twenty years.

But, things are about to change.
For the world has been invaded by aliens. Ugly aliens, who drip
green slime and take over minds and threaten humanity with wholesale
destruction. So, what are you going to do? Who you gonna' call
(another movie)? No atheists in a foxhole, they say. And here,
the foxhole is the whole world.

So Hirsch's son Jeff
Goldblum conveniently produces two dusty item's from
his father's past. As Goldblum and the President of the United
States go off on a last, desperate attempt to save the world,
Goldblum hands his father a very old siddur, and a yellowed,
stained tallit.

When the fighting heroes leave the
scene, Hirsch gathers everyone who has stayed behind around him.
In one of the movie's funniest scenes, which I was told brought
howls of laughter in Washington, but was greeted with uncomprehending
silence in Erie, Pennsylvania where I saw the movie, one character
resists the prayer circle on the grounds that he isn't Jewish,
to which Hirsch responds, "Well, no one's perfect." And so, with
the hopes of humanity gathered around him, Judd Hirsch opens
his siddur,
and intones the words of Sh'ma Koleinu.

"Sh'ma Koleinu, Adonai Eloheinu,
Chus V'racheim Aleinu; Hear our voice, O Lord our God;
have compassion upon us, and with that compassion accept our
prayer." It
is part of the Amidah, the daily service. And it is one
of the most powerful prayers of the entire High Holy Days.

The implication of the words is clear:
May God hear our prayer, and respond. May God hear our prayer,
and answer. May God hear our prayer, and grant us our wish.

My question is: does God really
do this? Can God really do this? Every time I say these words,
but, more so, with more intensity, during the Days of Awe,
with their searing imagery of life and death, and more then
ever now, this year, at this terrible time, every time I hear
these words I wonder how literally to take them.

Last night I mentioned the chance
involved, in missing a plane. Someone accidentally missed one
of the flights that was hijacked last week. There was a traffic
jam, and their life is saved! The first words out of most of
our mouths would be: "Thank God." But then I think: where was
God, for everyone else?

I believe that God does not
intervene in the outcome of events, that God does not cause
bad or good things to happen to us but that prayer matters
in our lives nonetheless. There remain reasons to pray, even
if it won't get us what we want.

I believe that God answers
our prayers by helping us make sense out of events. I simply
don't believe that things happen for a reason. But I do believe...
that they happen-ED for a reason.

I believe that God does not
cause bad or good things to happen to us, a small child
to contract a horrible disease, or an upstanding citizen to
win the lottery, either the smokestacks of Europe or a new
dawn on the distant shores of a Mediterranean Sea.

And I certainly don't believe that
God had anything to do with last week's events, except... in
the way we respond to them afterwards.

Now, many people like the Reverends
Falwell and Robertson think of religion in its earliest terms,
promises of bumper crops and material prosperity, right, good wealth
and good living as a reward for good behavior, punishment and exile
and terror and explosions as the just desserts of sin. Indeed,
much of the Torah, especially Deuteronomy, is meant to persuade
people of just this theory of divine providence, of reward and
punishment meted out measure for measure from an Almighty, all
powerful God. And the imagery of these Days of Awe invokes a God
who controls our fate.

But there are hints in our tradition
of another voice, of a faith-filled questioning of this puppet-pulling
view of the Holy One. The same Bible that gave us Deuteronomy
also gave us Job, a biting rebuttal, a stirring refutation
of the notion that only good things happen to good people,
a denial of the idea that, as one writer puts it "poverty is
the consequence of immorality rather than its cause."

And there are other ways in which
the idea comes through that maybe the cry to God to hear our voice
is not only about the outcome of events. The Talmud teaches that
there are some things we are not to pray for: the gender of a child
in utero, since the fact is already determined. Or: if you
are going home, and you see a house in the distance on fire, but
can not tell which one it is... you are not to pray that it is
not your home. For you would not wish the ill on someone
else. And God is not going to change what already is, just because
you wish it so.

Sometimes, you know, bad things happen.
Planes get seized. Debris from a shattered sky falls out of the
air. And hoping and wishing and wanting won't change them. They
did not happen because you deserved them. And they won't go away
with even the most heartfelt prayer.

Now, this may not be a very satisfying
explanation for suffering caused by other people. For human beings
who hurt and do harm. That has to do with free will, and bad choices.
With the question of good and evil. But at least in regard to natural
suffering, I believe that bad things happen because death is part
of the universe, that in order to have growth we must inevitably
have decay, that to have new things come to be you must also have
old things transform, change form, make room, take root, to return
anew as something else. Over time we cannot have the growth of
the new without the moving aside of the old.

Indeed, any time we change, any time
we grow, there is that instant, that paradoxical transformative
moment, before we can be what we are to become, we must surrender
what we have been. The yet-to-be cannot overlap the once-was.

The Hasidic rabbi Dov
Baer,
the Maggid of Mezritch noticed that the Hebrew letters
in the word "ani", meaning "I, " "myself," are the
very same letters as in the word "ain," meaning "nothingness." It
is only when we pass through the nothingness that the once
was can become the yet-to-be. Death, then, is the ultimate
nothingness through which we pass. It is thus a part of life,
a requirement for life.

But once it is here, no one and no
thing, not you, not me, not the best doctors in the world, not
the Doctor of the World can fully control it. We try. We strive.
We make progress. But we cannot control it all, not fully. Even
God cannot. Death and disease need to be part of the picture of
life. But once in the frame, they function, in nature, at least
partly at random.

At random. But. even so. I
believe that God does hear our voice. God does answer prayers.

I think about the spontaneous services
that we held last week, on Wednesday and Thursday nights, in
the aftermath of the attack. I think of how we concluded last
Thursday night, with the words of "America the Beautiful," of
the tears in the eyes of the people who were there, of the
heartfelt "Amen" as
response to our request for a blessing. I think of the strength
with which we sung the "Mishebeirach," the prayer for healing. "Baruch
Atah Adonai... Rofeih HaCholim, Blessed are You, who heals
the sick."

What is the power of prayer? It is
more, I think, than a hope for cures. Although I do not believe
that God intervenes directly to get one person out of a burning
building, and cause another to be trapped, I believe our coming
together in prayer is more than delusional wish-fulfillment. Something
happens to a community when we announce our own needs. Something
happens to us when we are aware of the pain in our midst. Something
happens to a patient when we prompt calls and cards and visits
from the mentioning of a name. It's not a miracle: that's false
advertising. But to turn the AA phrase on its head: healing happens.

I don't believe that things
happen for a reason. But I do believe... that they happen-ED
for a reason.

Karma. Kismet. B'shert. Every
culture has a word, every folk a phrase for fate, a sense that
things are part of a larger plan, that every little detail, every
meeting and moment of our lives unfolds in accordance with some
scheme we just can't grasp at the time, for some purpose which
we will, if we are lucky, someday, glimpse in passing.

I don't buy it. My friend dying of
breast cancer, my infant nephew's diabetes, last Tuesday, the Holocaust...
I'm sorry, I just can't accept that there was some single, pre-planned,
inherent meaning in these things. They didn't happen for a reason.
At the time.

But. That does not mean that these
things have no meaning. The true core of my religious understanding,
my spirituality comes from the belief that God works with us to
construct our memories and construe our fate. We work to make our
moments mean what they come to mean. We are the meaning-makers,
and God our partner in process, the Ever-Present One who enables
our efforts, who allows meaning to happen.

I do not believe that God caused
anyone's cancer, or anyone's miscarriage, or even the hurricanes,
earthquakes and bolts of lightning referred to in insurance terms
as, well, "acts of God." And I don't think God brought down the
World Trade Center. I think the terrorists did that all by themselves.

But God is there as we pick up the
pieces, with Hand and Shoulder and, eventually, a Push
in the Back to make us make whatever sense of our lives we
can, and move on.

Two days ago I heard a report on
the radio, from an architect in New York. He kept standing on
his balcony, staring at the skyline in disbelief. All he could
see was what was not there. But his nine-year old daughter
saw something else. She stood, and she held her father's hand.
And then she said: "Dad.
I think I can start to see the new view."

When we ask God for something, we
might not get it. But something happens to us in the asking, some
connections are made, some emotion expressed some cry of the soul
given a voice and a role in an ongoing play on the eternal stage
of Jewish life.

What are we really asking for? That
our prayer be accepted, not a wish fulfilled. That we return to
God, that we sense the potential for holiness in the midst of the
mundane and the momentous, in triumph... and in tragedy. That we
can start to see, in the skyline of the soul, the new view, of
the next stage of our lives.

Somewhere, in an ancient wall half
a world away, there are scribbled words on a scrap of paper. Somehow,
in a mystery beyond mind I am one with those words, at home with
hope.

I look at my beautiful children with
joy in my heart. I wonder what will happen to them, what will happen
in them, with all the same fears and questions and doubts and inability
to predict the future, which I felt before they were born. But
there is something that is calm, at the core of my being.

I don't really think God is going
to get mad at them for what they do or don't do. But I think God
will be there for them, in the reality of love, and to help them
make sense of the world. For them. And for us.